


Damn Close

by Fenix21



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Curtain Fic, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Near Death, Permanent Injury, Stubborn!Dean, caretaker!sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 17:20:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7182791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fenix21/pseuds/Fenix21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean almost makes it to fifty-six, or damn close, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Damn Close

**Author's Note:**

> This started one place, went somewhere else, and landed here. Lochinvar started it with one of her comments about old!Sam and Dean looking after each other, but this didn't quite turn out that way, so she's getting another one :)

Dean made it to fifty-six, or damn close, anyway. It was deep in a Montana winter just before Christmas, five weeks to the day before his birthday, that he stepped right when he should have gone left. 

The werewolf he and Sam were hunting was a smart son of a bitch, and when it snuck up on Dean from behind and he twisted to bring his rifle to bear, it anticipated his direction much more intelligently than either of them expected, swung around the opposite way, ripping his side open with a lighting fast strike under Dean's guard and forcing him far too close to the edge of a twenty foot outcropping. When the wolf lunged, Dean had nowhere to go but down. 

Sam’s pistol cracked through the night, twice, sharp in the cold air, finding its unerring mark, and his terrified bellow of ‘Dean!’ echoed after it. 

Moving Dean wasn’t an option. Getting him the five miles out of the foothills to the Impala was impossible, and the only thing Sam could do was thank Chuck the temperature was very near freezing, it had snowed the night before, and his brother’s body was already starting to chill in the drift where he’d landed, all of which contrived to keep him alive long enough for the medi-vac chopper to get there from the nearby resort whose mysterious missing skiers had drawn Sam and Dean’s attention in the first place.

Dean didn’t wake up for nearly a month. Sam spent the entire time by his side, cramped in a small plastic chair at first in the ICU and then a very thoughtful young nurse had smuggled in a recliner, still too short for his long legs but a thousand percent improvement over the chair, so that he could at least stretch out a little to sleep instead of be hunched over the side of Dean’s hospital bed with his fingers twined in his brother’s; though he still ended up that way most nights because he couldn’t stand to not be touching him.

Sam prayed at first. He prayed a lot. He didn’t consider it likely that God would answer the call personally or anything. Chuck and Amara had been in the wind for nearly twenty years, though to them that was probably the blink of an eye. Who knew what ‘a little while’ was to a god? He did have hope that maybe Dean warranted the attention of at least an angel or two. Cas had charged his brethren with keeping an eye to the Winchesters’ safety in his absence, but after two weeks of nightly vigils with his hands folded prayer fashion around one of Dean’s and no answer, Sam figured ‘keeping an eye out’ evidently didn’t stretch as far as ‘intervention on behalf of.’

When Dean finally did come around, it was to seventy-six staples, forty-two stitches, a handful of missing organs, three broken ribs, a fractured pelvic bone, dislocated hip and shoulder, and four thoracic vertebrae they’d had to fuse because of the damage to them. In short he was a wreck.

It was by far the worst beating Dean had taken outside of his time in Hell, and the most permanently debilitating. It was another six weeks before he was on his feet, and then only barely, neither his hip or shoulder able to support his weight or having the strength to manipulate a crutch or cane. He managed though, somehow, because he was not, ‘a fucking invalid gonna be tied to no damn wheelchair.’ 

Sam suffered the next six months in silence, supporting his stubborn pig-headed brother as best he could, bullying him into his doctor recommended physical therapy sessions and out of too many hours of his own ridiculously vigorous PT routines, while still trying to allow him his independence as he healed from his wounds and got his strength back. He spent the three months after that begging, pleading, imploring and finally getting into a fist fight over the fact that there was no way Dean could physically hunt any longer; and as much as it hurt him to do it, Sam proved it to him by putting him on his ass in the dirt with enough force that Dean had tears in his eyes from the pain and couldn’t get up for ten minutes. Sam stormed off and locked himself in his room for the rest of the day, sleeping alone for the first time since Dean had been in the hospital and the first time in nearly twenty-five years before that. 

Dean came to apologize the next day with grilled cheese sandwiches and beer which made Sam smile and roll his eyes because that was Dean’s favorite meal not Sam’s, but he wasn’t going to quibble the details as Dean sat down, stiff and obviously in pain from their tussle the day before, on the edge of Sam’s bed and said in a very quiet, frightened voice,

‘I don’t know how to be anything else, Sammy.’

Sam swallowed against the hard lump of regret forcing its way up his throat and reached to cup Dean's cheek, the scarred one where he'd been sliced open by a Harpy claw twelve years ago. Dean had fussed righteously about it marring his good looks until the ladies started doting, wanting to know how he'd gotten it. Sam thumbed the deep crow's feet at the corners of his brother's eyes, formed as much by pain as by laughter in the decades of their lives—centuries if you counted the time not spent strictly on this corporeal plane. Dean's eyes were a little watery, not as brilliant and sharp a green as they had once been. It was harder for him focus. He needed glasses to read these days, though he still wouldn't admit it, and never used them when he thought Sam was looking. There was gray in the stubble of his beard and at his temples, flecked through the fine dusting of hair over the rest of his body as well. Taken collectively it meant his brother was getting old, and Sam knew that one fact, above anything else, was what frightened Dean the most. There was Billie's promise after all—reapers weren't known to be forgetful or forgiving, no matter how much time passed—but more than that, Dean never wanted to leave Sam alone.

'We don't have to _be_ anything else, Dean,' Sam said softly, sifting his fingers up into the soft hair above Dean's ear, stroking over the eyebrow bisected by the Harpy scar. 'This is us. This bunker and the knowledge in it, and the experience we've gained through our lives. We don't have to stop being who we are. We can just…let someone else do the heavy lifting.'

Dean shook his head, like he didn't quite believe it, but Sam could tell he wasn't rejecting the idea completely out of hand either; and he knew he may not be able to sell Dean on it one hundred percent right this minute, but over the next weeks and months Sam would show him what kind of life they could still have, how they could still make a difference. For now, though…

Sam lifted the gooey sandwich from his own plate and stacked it on Dean's. 'Meanwhile, eat. The doc said he still wanted to see you put on a solid ten pounds.'

'Whatever, dude. I was never that heavy.'

Sam shrugged and tipped his beer to his lips. His free hand smoothed over Dean's back in deliberately absent strokes, tracing ridges of hardened scar tissue and the topography of building muscle all along his back, because Dean had been working hard, too hard in Sam's estimation, to get back to fighting condition. Despite that, though, it was easy for Sam to count out his brother's ribs through his taut skin, to slot his fingers in the valleys between each bow of bone and imagine he could feel the Enochian still etched there in Cas' precise hand. He was too thin, leaner than he had ever been since the days when they were just boys sometimes having to forage on John's inadequate allowance, and Sam's full belly took priority over anything and everything with Dean to the point he went days without food. Sam was making damn sure he got fed well now, but he was fighting a losing battle against problems that could not be solved by gaining a few more pounds or working out a few more times a week. 

Dean's own body was working against him in some cases, and he was incredibly stubborn about taking the pills the doctors had prescribed to help maintain his kidney function and various other issues that cropped up from the werewolf flaying and gutting him open in the snow, to the point Sam had nearly taken to treating him like a recalcitrant puppy and hiding them in his food. 'It's not about whether you _want_ to, Dean. It's about you _have_ to or you'll get sick and die on me!' he finally yelled at him one day over the array of bottles on the kitchen island that he was meticulously measuring out into a little plastic box with day/night labels on little flip-top lids. Sure it was a little dramatic, and Sam silently cursed himself for playing on his brother's worst fears, but it got the point across, and Dean grudgingly accepted his little plastic cup of pills in the morning now with the glass of orange juice Sam made him drink before he was allowed his coffee.

'Sammy, stop worrying so much.'

Sam blinked and realized his eyes were wet, and Dean had set aside his plate of sandwiches and his hand was on Sam's knee, squeezing hard in reassurance.

'You're too damn thin,' Sam managed hoarsely, as though that encompassed the whole of what was wrong with his brother.

Dean chuckled. 'And you're too tall. Some things we can't do anything about…anymore.'

'Dammit, Dean—'

'Hey.' Dean grasped Sam's chin in his large, warm hand, the one that had a long ridge of scar tissue across the palm because Dean had alway cut into his non-dominant hand whenever their blood was needed for one spell or sigil or another, and turned Sam to face him fully. 'I'm alive, okay. I'm still here, and I intend to stay here for a good long time. And you're—you're right that maybe I'm in no shape to go back out there guns blazing.' His voice cracked a tiny bit, and Sam reached to bracelet the wrist of the hand holding his face with long, strong fingers and squeeze hard. 'You're also right that we can still fight the good fight from right here, but you—' he pushed a finger into Sam's breastbone at the same time he pulled the pad of his thumb across his bottom lip, tugging it from between Sam's teeth, '—have got to quit worrying like I ain't gonna wake up tomorrow morning. 'Cause I will, Sammy. Long as you're breathin' I'm always gonna find a reason to get up the next day.'

Sam had nothing for that. The tears that had coalesced in his eyes spilled over, and he tilted his chin down so he could kiss the pad of the thumb rubbing firmly against his lip. 

'It was so close,' he rasped out, breath warm against Dean's skin.

'We've had closer,' Dean said gently, keeping up his stroking. 'Both of us.'

'But this time, if—'

'I know.' 

Sam shook himself free of Dean's hand and pushed forward into his space, winding his arms around his brother and squeezing until Dean wheezed a little, but he returned it, holding Sam just as hard, arms as strong and sure as they had always been.

'It'll happen one day, Sammy,' Dean whispered against Sam's hair. 'But it isn't gonna be today or tomorrow, or the next day, so you have to stop. You have to stop fighting the future and…be here with me today. Okay?'

Sam was speechless again, throat clogged up with all the months of stress and strain and fear over watching Dean's every move and step, trying to arrange and plan and manipulate every moment of every day so his brother would heal, come away from all this as whole as Sam could make him. 

He nodded into the curve of Dean's neck, face hot with his own tears and unsteady breaths that pretended, poorly, not to be sobs. Dean tucked him close and kissed the crown of his head and rubbed a calloused thumb in slow circles at his temple, and he felt himself being rocked.

'I'm here, Dean,' he breathed against his brother's throat, face still tucked close. 'I'm here, now…I promise.' 

Dean nodded, and Sam felt him smile. 'That's my boy.'


End file.
